The Best Microsoft Office Alternatives

LibreOffice is a free suite of application for creating text documents, spreadsheets, presentations which you can then save in Microsoft Office formats. If you are open source lover and if just a user, you definitely know about the benefits of the LibreOffice and the new version i.e 5.0 which deserves to top the list of contenders for best performance in this category. This version was released last month for windows, Linux and mac OS. It has been a tough ride for LibreOffice to stand on top even after the contenders being able to come up with unique features.

The launch of LibreOffice coincided with the roll out of windows 10 making it a contender with the new Microsoft office which also featured cross platform. Even with the head to head competition, LibreOffice was able to stand out well. The success of LibreOffice even after such great features of the contenders is because of the vast improvements made by LibreOffice which made using other office apps unnecessary. It is a full featured open source office suite that compares head to head with every product in the same category but the main reason it is able to stand out is because of its superior interchangeability features. The main project open office was the one which was leading in the open source community. However after it got fractured into two projects namely Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, they both have been working on their new versions and they have been far more better than the previous open office suite. LibreOffice, forked from open office makes a clear distinction about the limited features of the open office. Now Libre office has a clear look, good user interface and proper use of the screen space. That might also be the reason why most of the distributions have switched their office suite from openoffice.org to LibreOffice.

LibreOffice has been a good contender with some of the areas it has really improved on the suite. Improvements are also seen in different modules of the suite. The upgrades that LibreOffice bring are really hefty and they have just gone through three development cycles since 2010 and you can image how much improvement they can bring in such long period. Even though the looks has not changed that much, there is a ease of use in the package which makes users more comfortable to use the office suite after every updates.

With the new improved UI, it provides more space for writing and editing for the users. The changes can be seen to a user who has been working on it for long time. And even the new user can find the new UI really compatible to their regular use. There is also a thing that makes it more reliable. The number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below 0.001. That indicated the new version will have less bugs and much of the bugs solved from previous versions which will also create and ease for developers to develop, maintain and debug.